What the investigators didn't say as they stood outside his home for nearly 40 minutes was what was taking place simultaneously at Kohlhepp's 95-acre wooded property near Woodruff.

The team had met the day before with search warrants in hand and laid out a plan. Half would go to his secluded property; half would go to his house in Moore.

While standing outside, Ezell asked questions about the missing couple, Kala Brown and Charles David Carver, and revealed that they knew Brown and Carver's cellphones had last pinged at Kohlhepp's Woodruff land.

Kohlhepp said he knew Brown. She occasionally cleaned houses for his real estate agency, he said. Kohlhepp said that on the day they went missing, Brown and Carver had spent an hour on his property pruning trees but had left because it was too hot.

Investigators knew that was a lie. Cellphone records placed the couple on his property for much longer that day.

Ezell kept asking questions. What were they driving? Did he leave them on the property? Had he tried to reach them since they went missing?

At each opportunity, Kohlhepp rambled, talking about his property and his real estate company, Todd Kohlhepp & Associates, about clearing trees from his land and the dangers of bush hogs and unreliable employees and renters who frequently complained.

In the coming days, the Independent Mail and The Greenville News will continue to chronicle how investigators captured Kohlhepp, a man who hid his criminal past while he nurtured a successful real estate career in the Upstate. This story is based on interviews with those involved, police records obtained first by the Independent Mail and hundreds of other documents, photos, video and audio clips that The Greenville News and Independent Mail sought through Freedom of Information Act requests. The 7th Judicial Circuit Solicitor's Office released most of the information late Friday, June 9.

On May 26, Kohlhepp began serving seven consecutive life sentences, one for each person he admits he killed over the course of more than a decade of crimes. His victims are: Carver, Spartanburg husband and wife Johnny Coxie and Meagan Coxie, and Superbike Motorsports employees Scott Ponder, Beverly Guy, Brian Lucas and Chris Sherbert. He was sentenced to 60 more years for kidnapping and sexually assaulting Brown.

The Independent Mail and The Greenville News do not typically identify victims of sexual assault, but Brown has spoken about her ordeal in a national television interview.

Brown has not responded to several previous requests for interviews from the Independent Mail and The Greenville News and her spokesman said Tuesday that she was unavailable.

Ezell's search for the missing Anderson couple had led them to Kohlhepp. Ezell had pored over Brown's Facebook records that she received in mid-October. According to her police notes, she found "numerous communications" about Brown and her boyfriend Carver "meeting a Todd Kohlhepp at his residence in Moore SC and Kohlhepp taking them to a property to work outdoors for the day, for payment."

Ezell kept her tone light and even as she addressed Kohlhepp. "You probably didn't know you were the last one to see them."

"I didn't see any of that coming," Kohlhepp responded quickly. "At all."

As Kohlhepp crouched in the front hallway of his house petting Taz, investigators laid out their reasons for seeking a search warrant, invited Kohlhepp to answer questions and told him his rights.

Kohlhepp agreed, pulled up a swivel chair and sat in it, then grabbed a coffee mug and walked to the kitchen to refill it. Later, investigators learned a loaded handgun was stashed just feet away above the doorway in the pantry, one of several guns found at his house or in his vehicles. The back door to the house stood open.

'Just the girl; just the girl'

Eight miles away, Ezell's partner on the missing-couple case, Anderson Detective Brad Whitfield, accompanied a caravan of about 20 Spartanburg County Sheriff's Office investigators down the long gravel road that led to Kohlhepp's property. They took the same path Carver had taken two months earlier, in the moments before he died.

Whitfield passed a green metal storage container and a small wooden building before stopping at a concrete garage. Inside, he saw a front-end loader tractor, an all-terrain vehicle and "a number of firearms," some with suppressors or silencers, according to his notes.

"In this area, I also noticed what looked like a cage," Whitfield wrote in a police report. "It was approximately eye level and approximately 3 feet by 3 feet in width and depth, respectively. This looked out of place because of its nature and capacity to hold something the size of a human."

Next, officers went to an upstairs apartment that was part of the garage, according to the report.

"It appeared to be generic living quarters with the exception of a makeshift pallet adjacent to the bed and what appeared to be shackles hanging from the wall about the pallet," Whitfield wrote.

After that, Whitfield looked at two rooms adjacent to a garage: "a walk-in gun closet" and a bathroom.

It's what he found in the bathroom that startled him.

In a wastebasket sat a pile of freshly cut, reddish-brown hair.

"That immediately made the hair on the back of my neck stand up," Whitfield said in an interview Tuesday. "I knew then that we were onto something."

Authorities attempt to cut into a lock of the shipping container on Todd Kohlhepp's property on Wofford Road.(Photo: Submitted)

Sheriff's Office deputies then looked at another storage building before moving on to the green metal storage container, according to Whitfield's notes.

The container had five padlocks: four along the bottom of the doors and another one that was heavier and shielded.

Whitfield retrieved red bolt cutters from the back of his car.

"I'm kind of a Boy Scout," he said Tuesday. "I shop at Ace Hardware and I got them a while back with my Ace rewards card, and I just carry them around in case I need to get into something."

But the locks were too strong for the cutters.

Officers took turns hitting the locks with a sledgehammer.

One officer stopped when he heard a noise.

A kitten ran out from under the container.

Soon after the hammering restarted, officers heard banging coming from inside the container.

A Sheriff's Office investigator "made contact with what sounded like a female," according to Whitfield's notes.

As Whitfield began to talk about that moment Tuesday, he stopped to take a deep breath.

"The whole atmosphere changed," he said. "We had been taking turns making fun of the guys swinging the sledgehammer, thinking that all we were going to find were items in a box. Then there's this sudden moment of: 'Oh, my God, there's a person in that box.'"

After officers notified emergency medical personnel that they needed their help, they used some of Kohlhepp's own tools to get inside the container.

"To this day, I don't know how long it took to get inside," Whitfield said in an interview. "All I know is that it felt like it took 10 years."

Inside the container, Sheriff's Office investigators found a woman chained by the neck.

Brown had lived that way for more than two months.

“Just the girl; just the girl,” an investigator said in a video of the rescue.

“We’re going to get you out of here, OK?” another said.

Whitfield did not go inside the container.

But moments later, when he saw Brown, she still had the chain around her neck. They used his bolt cutters to remove it.

Whitfield became emotional Tuesday as he described that moment.

"The hand of God put us there," he said. "It's what I call a blessing and a curse. It was a tremendous blessing for Kala and for us."

His voice broke as he choked back tears.

"I feel horrible, though, that we didn't get to Charles David Carver in time."

Carver's car, a 2002 white Pontiac Grand Prix, was later found concealed in a ravine on the property.

The car had been smeared with a brown liquid, according to Whitfield's police notes, and its license tag had been removed.

Whitfield called Ezell while she was at Kohlhepp's house.

"I said: 'We found her. We found her. We found her.' I had to say it that many times because Ezell didn't seem to believe it, almost like it was too unbelievable to sink in."

Spartanburg County Sheriff Chuck Wright updates the media outside the Wofford Road property in Woodruff where a missing Anderson woman was found chained in a metal container on Thursday. HEIDI HEILBRUNN/Staff

Spartanburg County Sheriff Chuck Wright updates the media outside the Wofford Road property in Woodruff where a missing Anderson woman was found chained in a metal container on Thursday. HEIDI HEILBRUNN/Staff

Spartanburg County Sheriff Chuck Wright updates the media outside the Wofford Road property in Woodruff where a missing Anderson woman was found chained in a metal container on Thursday. HEIDI HEILBRUNN/Staff